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Visionary Salon - February 6th, 2013

Visionary Salon - February 6th, 2013

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Our Visionary Salon Dinner will be held on February 6th, 2014. This exclusive by-invitation-only event will feature a wine reception and an elegant dinner; a fireside chat will follow with 2013 Visionary Award Honoree Ray Kurzweil, interviewed by Steve Jurvetson, Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The Salon will be held at the beautiful Quadrus Conference Center in Menlo Park, California.

Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions. Called "the restless genius" by The Wall Street Journal and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes magazine, Kurzweil was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison." PBS selected him as one of the "sixteen revolutionaries who made America."
Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.
Among Kurzweil’s many honors, he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, holds twenty honorary Doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents.
Ray has written five national best-selling books, including New York Times best sellers The Singularity Is Near (2005) and How To Create A Mind (2012). He is Director of Engineering at Google.

Steve Jurvetson is a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, where his current board responsibilities include SpaceX, Synthetic Genomics, and Tesla Motors (TSLA). He was the founding VC investor in Hotmail (MSFT), Interwoven (IWOV), Kana (KANA), and NeoPhotonics (NPTN). He also led DFJ's investments in other companies that were acquired for $12 billion in aggregate. Previously, Steve was an R&D Engineer at Hewlett-Packard, where seven of his communications chip designs were fabricated. His prior technical experience also includes programming, materials science research, and computer design at HP's PC Division, the Center for Materials Research, and Mostek. He has also worked in product marketing at Apple and NeXT Software.

He was honored as "The Valley's Sharpest VC" on the cover of Business 2.0 and chosen by the SF Chronicle and SF Examiner as one of "the ten people expected to have the greatest impact on the Bay Area in the early part of the 21st Century." Steve was chosen by Forbes as one of "Tech's Best Venture Investors", by the VC Journal as one of the "Ten Most Influential VCs", and by Fortune as part of their "Brain Trust of Top Ten Minds."

Each year at the SVForum Visionary Awards, we honor industry leaders who have pioneered innovation and fostered the spirit of entrepreneurship. These visionaries and distinguished business leaders continue to shape Silicon Valley. This is an exclusive, invitation-only event for 150-200 CEOs and executives. Past award recipients include Sal Khan, Elon Musk, Lou Gerstner, Bill Gates, Doug Engelbart, John Chambers, Jim Clark, Judy Estrin, Erwin Jacobs, Vinod Khosla, Kay Koplovitz and Vint Cerf, as well as a number of other high-profile contributors to their industries. The SVForum Visionary Event (June 2014) will be an exclusive event for SVForum sponsors, press and previous Visionaries, as well as 2014 award recipients. Attendees have consistently commented that this is the best event in the Valley and one of the most enjoyable “business” events they attend each year.